Ghosts in the Machines
by flowerthief
Summary: Once liberated during a S.H.I.E.L.D. sting, Micah Amari must find a foothold in a world she's become desensitized to. Once a healer used to break others, she struggles with her new autonomy. She finds similar ghosts in Bucky Barnes, who has just taken on the Captain America mantle. Now she must figure out who she is and isn't before she becomes S.H.I.E.L.D.'s latest Armageddon.
1. Doctor's Orders

**A/N: Chapters will get longer, and more likely than not, there will be at least one major time skip ! Most of the Avengers will be present at some point, especially Bruce ! First time writing for a few of these characters, so constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated ! C: Hope you're all having rad days . **

I was lightheaded, but I'd never felt so heavy.

My bones weighed me down—my skin, my limbs, even my bruises were a burden.

I slid down the cell wall, and slowly to the floor, until my hair was a dark mast beneath me and the cold cement cut through the pervasive ache.

_Mend their bones or mend your own_.

The sentence curled around me, and I could almost taste it through the crimson slick of iron.

I messed up, I knew it now. Complacency had been slowly killing me, and I'd opted for heroics to take me in one go. Except I'd been wrong. Funny, I was blinder back when I could see through both eyes.

There was shouting, then, as my vision grew thin around the edges. I dragged my fingertips across my face, drew halfhearted circles around my eyes. My vision cleared steadily, and my focus grew almost too sharp.

I let my hands fall, the backs of them smacking against the hard floor, gold on grey. I braced myself as the door burst open and the pounding of boots and the scrape of metal consumed me.

"We've got another one!" A coarse voice shouted back, back to the parade of men with guns pointed all around, ready to loose lead confetti.

I stared blankly up at the figure looming over me, trying to pinpoint what wasn't quite right. His arm. His arm glinted in the light.

He bent, and I tensed, swallowing and wishing for the seven hundred and thirty fourth time that I'd said no.

"Hey. Hey, you're safe now." His features didn't scream 'bedside manner'—all carved lines, too rough to be very pretty. His mouth quirked. It looked like it entertained smirks more than smiles. He glanced back at his men, making a decision.

"I'm gonna move you, ok? We're going to take you someplace safe, someplace with a doctor."

I smiled wanly, turning away so that the purple and blue of my cheek could find consolation in the chill plane beneath me. "Nowhere's safe, and I am the doctor."


	2. Fresh Air

I was cocooned in a crinkly silver blanket. There was a mask on my face, and I forgot oxygen could be this clean. When I tried to rip it off, a staying hand caught me.

"Best to let it be." A temperate voice, but firm. "The air down there was all kinds of bad news."

I didn't have the energy to tell him that it didn't matter, that I didn't get sick days. That I didn't need them. So instead I let my head fall back against the seat, my thoughts slide back into oblivion, having to trust wherever we were going couldn't be worse than where I'd been.

The next time I was conscious I found myself in a white, white room. I was hooked up to machines. Slowly, I sat up, and determined I was more or less in one piece. I tore the IV out like the loose cannon in an action film, not willing to be rendered immobile. I took in the situation, trying to decide where I was exactly. A med bay, for sure. There were clear cases full of syringes, supplies, and pill bottles locked up with prescription-strength paranoia.

_Mend their bones or mend your own._

My lungs were collapsing like dying stars, burning out their oxygen as my vision narrowed and the ringing of shell casings bouncing off tile filled my ears-

I dug my nails into my skin, finding reality in the crescent slivers of moon they left. I was not that woman sitting in the corner, hugging her knees as she tried to keep out of the way of the blood spatter.

As far as the government was concerned, I was saccharine script on a gravemarker in Kansas.

"You really should have left those in." It was that same mild-mannered voice from earlier, breaking the quiet where his footsteps didn't.

"I don't know what's in those tubes. So they don't get to stay." My voice was rough from sleep and a half-crushed trachea.

"I can understand that." There was something about the lines around his eyes that made me think maybe he did. He took a few more steps into the room and I tensed. He paused, pursing his lips. I was so fatigued, I was becoming transparent. "Look, you don't have to worry about any trouble from me. I'm just here to make sure you get out of here okay."

"Do you run this place?"

"No, thank God. I'm—" He seemed to struggle to label himself. "I'm a doctor."

"So tell me—why am I the only one here?" There were four empty cots in the room.

"To be honest—the people I work with, they've got a lot of questions. And you're the only one in any kind of shape to answer them."

"They're dead, aren't they?"

"A lot of the cell bailed, some are in our custody now." He said. "And yes, there were casualties."

"No." I swallowed. "Good. Fine. Are my cellmates—how many of them survived?"

The Good Doctor shifted his weight.

"You."

My mouth still tasted like arsenic.

"Yeah. Yeah, I thought it might be like that."


	3. Dead on Arrival

They made me sleep for a day, had me talk to a psychiatrist. She told me I was at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, and that meant I was safe. I told her I'd been in the same city as S.H.I.E.L.D. for a year and a half, and it meant nothing.

The Good Doctor didn't dance around the fact that they needed information from me, but he made a point of having me know they understood I'd been through something they couldn't understand. I took it all in good grace. I had no assets, no resources. I could use the free ride while I figured out what to do with myself.

Besides, I needed at least another day to flush the arsenic out of my system.

Once the alarm went off, a man had come and forced seven pills down my throat.

"Not even you can come back from this, demon. Give my regards to Anubis."

I didn't have time to correct his ignorance. He was the one who ran into whoever's set up shop in the land of the dead.

The next morning, I woke up to the man with the metal arm sitting across the room, lax.

"You're the one who carried me out." I thought maybe I should feel gratitude.

The focus in the gaze he turned on me made me wonder how far away he'd been.

"Yeah, you were in pretty rough shape."

"Happens."

"Pretty flippant, for being on the brink of death."

"Kind of loses its novelty after the first few times."

"You're not wrong."

"So who are you anyway."

"I'm—Bucky. Bucky Barnes."

"You sound like an eighties cartoon." I said. "Which I guess is better than me. I'm a rock. Micah Amari."

"Glad you made it out ok, Micah. Look, I know things are—there's never gonna be an ideal time. Are you willing to talk about what happened down there?"

I played with the corner of the sheets. Didn't want to talk. Didn't have a clue what I did want to do—what do you do when your days are no longer cycles of pain—receiving, and enabling?

But I didn't want to talk.

"Please." Bucky said. "I know it's hard. It's counterintuitive. But—I'm finding, it might make things better, in the long run."

"You think I'm selfish."

"I think—you're surviving."

We sat in silence for awhile. Two minutes, ten. I was impressed by the lack of pressure. But it just made me feel like there were verbal eggshells to be walked on. That more than anything made me speak.

"After a certain point—it was—it was never like I was invisible. But I was…periphery." I said. "They called themselves the neophytes of the Ninth." I shook my head. "It was dumb, really. They had a thing about snakes or something. Global supremacy. Not very original. Anyways. If you find me a pen and paper, I'll write down what I know."

Bucky nodded slowly. "I'll do that." He made for the door, turning back at the last second. "Can I get you anything?"

All I wanted was absolution and Absolut, but I settled for water and cough drops.

When he came back, I popped a lozenge between my teeth and began scribbling ceaselessly. I filled eight pages by the time the taste of cherry was gone from my mouth. I wrote for three pages more before slipping them into the manila envelope he'd placed on the nightstand.

I began to speak but-

There was a moment where I couldn't breathe. Then I was convulsing. He crossed the room, reaching out to steady me. I recoiled, and he backed off immediately, looking down at his hands, conflicted. But then he looked back up at me.

"Bruce."

I felt my face.

Black liquid trickled from my nose in thin rivulets, settling on the sheets.

"It's fine." I dug my fingers into the mattress. "Call him off. It's fine. I'm fine."

"I have no idea what the hell that is, but I know it sure as hell isn't fine." I grit my teeth as he rifled through the medical supplies on the nearest table, as if he'd know what to do with any of it.

"It's gross as hell is what it is." I said. "But it just means the poison's out of my system." I reached for a sterile napkin on the nightstand and patted my nose gingerly, tempest passed.

"There wasn't any poison in your tox screen."

"I didn't want there to be." I wanted to limit my vulnerabilities to the ones that were too visible to hide.

"What."

It was time to stop playing the victim. They would find out sooner or later, once they read the files. Read about the experiments. I pushed the ruined sheets off of me, swinging my legs over the side of the cot.

"What are you—you're in no condition to—_Bruce._"

I raked my fingertips across my throat, above my sternum, and along my legs. I didn't need contact, but I needed other people to think I did. When my bruises faded, muscles knit themselves back together again, I smiled at him wanly, full of endorphins for the first time in days. I took a step as my new marrow crunched into place. You'd never tell my ankles were broken just a minute ago.

There was a beat, maybe just the one from my freshly healed heart.

"Yeah I've got kind of an unconventional PHd."


	4. Binary 1

"So you uh, you do something neat with your—bones, there." Bucky managed, gesturing at me, up and down with his pointer and middle fingers. "I should probably call someone about that, shouldn't I?"

I'm the first to say I'm vain—I would have liked a bit of astonishment for the trouble of putting my full weight on broken bones. But the stride he took it in was gratifying in its own way.

"Probably in your job description somewhere." I agreed. Now that I'd played my parlor trick, I settled back onto the cot, legs dangling off the side. I didn't realize how much pain I'd been in until it was gone, and I remembered how it felt to breath normally, to move without feeling glass in my joints.

"You must've been in a staggering amount of pain. Why didn't you just heal yourself from the get-go?"

"The poison was first priority." I'd learned time and again, poison was forceful if left alone. "And I didn't know who you were. I still don't, but I figure you won't sell me out to the press or anyone worse."

"What's happening?" The door bounced off the wall as the Good Doctor rushed in. "Is she flatlining?"

I fluttered a lazy jazz hand. "False alarm. Tin Man here got ahead of himself."

He cast a bemused look at Bucky. "You better give me better than that. I just spilled a full cup of coffee on Natasha on my way out."

"Micah's situation is a little more complicated than we were thinking." He replied, mouth twisted between too many emotions.

"Do tell."

And that's how I ended up in an interrogation room three floors away.

I drummed my fingers against the hard tabletop, looking back at myself in the one way window. I actually hadn't seen myself in a proper reflection in months. I'd associated myself as a tiny, curved figure on the back of a spoon, or the stretched edge of a scalpel.

When Director Fury took the other chair, I forced myself to keep my lax position. There was something about his presence that made me want to straighten my spine, and I resented it.

"Seems like you've managed to throw us for a couple loops, Ms. Amari." He said, looking for all the world like he knew everything about everything and therefore lacked the capacity to be surprised.

"What are you going to do to me?"

He took a moment to answer, never wavering. "We're not going to do anything to you. You're a free woman."

"You're telling me, I can walk out that door, walk out of this building, and we're done. That you won't follow me, won't keep tabs."

"You can walk out of this building and we won't bat an eye if you drop off the map—if that's what you're wanting." He leaned forward. "You are not a spoil of war. Nothing is expected in return for your liberation." He leaned back. "Don't misunderstand me. We very much want to be involved in your future."

"I'm your cheat code to figuring out the Ninth." I was used to that. Being a string of numbers and letters. Before the first test, they'd tried to burn them into my skin. 1701-39RGN. But they didn't stick. The ink ran, the scars faded.

"You're our quickest means of finding the men behind the curtain, yes. And I hope you'll be willing to help us out that far. But do not mistake that—you are not a resource."

"So—what, I fill in a few multiple choice, and you cut me free?"

"Is that what you want? Us to give you a freshly minted identity and a stack of bills?" He shook his head. "It's your choice. But if you stick around, we can help you find your footing again. And out there, you might just find you're more off balance than you thought."

Despite that acknowledgement, he didn't look at me like I was broken. Like I was 'other'. He knew we were different down to mindsets and molecules, and still.

I drummed my fingertips against the steel, nails clicking out a beat like downpour. I needed money. Time. Shelter. I was self-reliant. But even I couldn't scrounge up social security and rent out of years of anonymity and systematic abuse.

And that's how I became employed by S.H.I.E.L.D.


	5. Polaroid

** A/N: Finally have time to write again ! Hopefully I'll be able to keep it up . Trigger warnings for this chapter: mild body horror and psychological distress . **

"Your form's abysmal."

I ducked an embarrassing amount of seconds too late, taking a fist straight to the sternum. The fact that he'd had enough time to soften the blow—predicting my weak reaction time—made it sting more than it would have to begin with. I felt cheated of a bruise.

"Okay I know you predate the rise of some of the classics—like Pac-Man and solar power and, say, dinosaurs. But I'm pretty sure they had positive reinforcement back in your day, Tin Man."

"You're right." He said, kicking my feet out from under me, and catching his arm across my throat. "Congratulations on only _kind of _having your ass handed to you. It's downright admirable."

He let up, rolling to his heels like a cat. Despite the roughly hewn exterior, the past year had proven to me Bucky was less ice and more icing. Fury had refused to let me begin combat until I'd undergone five months of hardcore therapy and two of field training. When the day finally came that I got my official check in the 'functional' column, he'd tacked me on Bucky. I would have thought Captain America had better things to be doing than tossing me around every other day. In the beginning, he made it painfully apparent he thought so, too.

But things were different, now.

"You realize the likelihood of you needing to know how to perform half of these moves is slim to nonexistent, yeah? I don't think Bruce has ever thrown anything more forceful than a fist bump-don't give me that look I mean when he's not feeling green and grumpy-and I know you're not classically trained as a doctor, but hopefully these wouldn't be your first choice in subduing unruly patients."

"I do actually have a life outside of the med bay. You've never seen Bruce when he's missed his hourly caffeine fix. And do I need to remind you about that rookie who came in hopped up on that black market rabies strain created by whoever was the villainous flavour of the month? He can't even look me in the eyes. There isn't exactly a card for 'sorry I bit off half your ring finger'." I ticked off my counterarguments, ending with a wiggle of said finger.

"Well. You grew it back, didn't you?" When he smirked, it was like gravity let up for those few seconds. When he smiled, the planet practically broke out of orbit.

"Yeah, latest model." I struck up my middle finger like a match. "Woops, wrong one. Silly me, they're all interchangeable after awhile."

It didn't really bother me, when people pointed out my abnormalities so flippantly. I preferred the elephants in the room to be minimized. I just appreciated the irony of taking liberties with the international icon of liberty. Or, more accurately, the post-Soviet _Grease _extra who picked up the shield once the former Cap fell.

That was another thing I'd learned in my crash course to S.H.I.E.L.D. Just a footnote, really. That Bucky had only recently made any sort of neat deal with his personal demons after being an emotionally desensitized assassin. Perversely, I constantly wondered if I would have fared better those years ago if I'd been equally stripped of myself.

"The disrespect I put up with." He shook his head. "Go brush the dust off, kid. We're done for the day."

This was one of the nicer sparring rooms, equipped with a locker room and more weapons than I even knew what to call. I took advantage of the former accommodation, having left a set of plainclothes in 726. I was just pulling my sleeves along my arms and then I was on the floor.

I held tight to the feeling of the metal edge of the locker running against my spine, but it wasn't enough to prevent the phantom pressure of needles and steel bars locked into my vertebrae. When I opened my eyes, my fingers were dislocated. _Not real. _

I tried to choke out a mantra, but my throat was useless, the air in my lungs void. _Tile under my palms. Silence in the air. The scent of fresh rubber. Iron. Red behind my eyes, I won't see, I will not see. _My psychiatrist had told me to label reality, to keep me from slipping back to the tanks and blood-stained linoleum.

_Bare feet. Cold. Fuck, I need like twenty pairs of socks. Just one on top of the other. Fluorescents slicing through my eyelids like scalp—no, not going there. _

I went through the motions six times before I could open my eyes and not see Ghosts of Torture Past. Or science. Y'know. If they were still justifying it these days.

I lowered my hands from either side of my face, unfurled like a trampled flower.

And then I went back to the med bay, smiled at Bruce, and fixed a woman's collarbone.


End file.
